- 1. Take control of your destiny. Your grade destiny, that is. There’s no teacher or parent to remind you every day what you need to do, or to make sure you’ve studied for exams. It’s all in your hands. So step up to the plate and take responsibility. The grades you get will depend on what you yourself do.
- Don’t overload. Some students think it’s a mark of pride to take as many course hours as the college allows. It isn’t. Take four or, at the most, five courses each semester. That way you’ll be able to devote all your energies to a manageable number of subjects, and you won’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity.
- Get your a** to class. Most students have a cutting budget: the number of lectures they think they can miss in each course and still do well. But if there are thirty-five class meetings, each class contains 3 percent of the content: miss seven classes, and you’ve missed 20 percent of the material.
- Take really good notes. In many intro courses, the professor’s lectures form the major part of the material tested on the midterm and final. So as you’re taking notes, you’re really writing the textbook for the course—which in many cases is more important than the official textbook. Be sure to get down everything the professor says and to maintain your notes in an organized and readable form. After all, these are the notes you’ll have to study a number of times later in the course.
- Study like you mean it. There’s a difference between studying and “studying”—and you know what it is. When you’re really studying, you’re 100 percent focused on and engaged with the material: a total immersion in what you’re doing and a strong desire to get it right. When you’re only half-heartedly studying, you’re really only 35 percent involved, with the other 65 percent of your attention divided among tweeting your friend about how much you’re studying, scoping out the surrounding tables to see who else might be around (and how attractive they are), and daydreaming about all the fun things you’ll do when you finish this awful studying. Look, we know studying can be painful, but all students who get A’s do it—no matter what they tell you.
- Do all the homework. You might think the homework and problem sets—each of which is worth maybe 0.1 percent of the grade—are just busywork: something the professor assigns to make sure you’re doing something in the course each week. But really, the homework provides applications of the concepts, principles, and methods of the field to actual examples—the same sort of examples that will come up on the bigger tests. If you do well on the homework—that is, get ten out of ten on the problem sets or a check-plus on the little writing exercises—you’re putting yourself in a good position to get a 100 when it really counts—on the midterm or final.
- Take each test three times. When done right, taking a test is really three activities: preparing for the test, taking the actual exam, then going over the comments to see what mistakes you made. Each activity furnishes important—and grade-improving—information: the studying gives you practice in questions very similar to the those that will be on the test; the actual test is where the A is earned (at least in the best case); and the review of the comments (often accompanied by a visit to the professor’s office hour to clear up anything unclear) is an investment in an A on the next test.
- Always answer the question asked. More points are lost on tests and papers by not answering the question asked than by giving the wrong answer. That’s because students often have strong—and wrong—preconceptions about what the professor should be asking. “How can the question be so specific?” they wonder. “How can the professor not be asking a question about last week’s classes, especially since he (or she) seemed so interested in that topic?” “Can the professor really be asking about that journal article we weresupposed to read, or about the discussion in section?” Don’t try to psych out the professor or distrust what you see before your very eyes. Answer the question, as asked, head-on. (If you’re not sure what’s meant, always ask—and rescue your grade.)
- Play all four quarters. Many college courses are “back-loaded.” More than half the grade is left to assignments due the last month of the semester: a third test, 15 percent; the term (or research) paper, 25 percent; the cumulative final, 30 percent. You get the idea. Pace yourself and don’t run out of gas just as you’re coming into the home stretch.
- Do all the “extras.” In some courses, there are special end-of-thesemester activities that can improve your grade. Review sessions, extra office hours, rewrites of papers, extra-credit work—all of these can be grade-boosters. Especially in schools where there are no pluses and minuses, even a few extra points can push your borderline grade over the hump (from, say, a B-plus to an A-minus—that is, an A).
- Join a community. Many students improve their grades by working with study buddies or study groups. Try to meet at least once a week—especially in courses in which there are weekly problem sets or quizzes. And if your school offers “freshman clusters” in which a group of students all take the same section of some required courses, sign up for them, too. Students can improve their grades one level or more when they commit to working in an organized way with other students.
Read More : 11 Secrets of Getting Good Grades in College
